Professor Margaret Kelleher is Director of An Foras Feasa: the Institute for Research in Irish Historical and Cultural Traditions, at NUI Maynooth. She is the author of The Feminization of Famine (published by Duke UP and Cork UP, 1997) and co-editor (with Philip O’Leary) of The Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006). She was a contributing editor to the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume IV: Irish Women’s Traditions (2002).

She has published widely in the areas of nineteenth-century Irish writing, Irish literary history, and women's writings. She is currently Chairperson of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures and representative for Ireland on the European Science Foundation’s Standing Committee for the Humanities.

Her current research project is a study of bilingual culture in nineteenth-century Ireland.